About The IGF

IndieGames.com is presented by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, which runs the Independent Games Festival & Summit every year at Game Developers Conference. The company (producer of the Game Developers Conference series, Gamasutra.com and Game Developer magazine) established the Independent Games Festival in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers.

Another day, another fun batch of freeware and browser-based Indie Speed Run games to try: a hyper-fast tower defense game where you are building a way to the moon, a sheep herding and sheering game with a bald shine and hungry enemies, a Monaco-like game with one player having all the skills needed, and a top-down furniture rearranging game.

These are my next picks while digging through Indie Speed Run 2.0.

I'll start with the most energetic game I played today: browser-based tower defense Goodbye, Earth. Chia-yu Chen, Yuxio Tzeng, Lee-kuo Chen, and Allen Lee took "colonization" and "gavel" and created a game where you must build and protect a space elevator to the Moon, leaving Earth behind. You can plant as many pieces down as you have money, and shooting the asteroids quickly yield more money to reinforce the space elevator and its defenses.

Agent Eraser is a browser-based, top-down stealth game made by Wes Selken, Iskander Izzy, and Clovis Junior. Using "surveilance" and "eraser," the team created a hacker who can erase any data, and uses EMPs, flash grenades and more to take down guards, cameras, and whatever opposes the purple player. The music oddly stops at times, but the gameplay remains solid.

The Persian Rug Game by Morgan Owen and Josh Marriage combines "success" and "Persian rug" (don't those two things go together naturally??) into a browser-based spatial puzzle game. You click and drag objects to place them in different spots in the house, earning the most points you can. Different actions yield different points but repeated actions seem to take away points. This one takes a bit of experimenting to get into and get better at.

Finally, Windows freeware survival game Shep Hard combines the concepts of "baldness" and "Shepard" (not my spelling) and requires you to herd sheep with what I think is sugar, sheer them with your cane until they turn platinum, and use the same cane to whack the hungry wolves. As those predators get more fierce, you'll want to use new weapons and attacks to whack them off the sides of the land.

Those are just four of hundreds of games made in under 48 hours for Indie Speed Run 2.0. Have you played any others you've enjoyed?